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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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14. The Breaking Up of the Hierarchical Paradigm This certain summer day is not only hot and humid, but it also has a peculiar and distinctive stillness, a kind of waiting quality, as if Nature is explaining how we are now at the top and soon we'll turn and move down the other side of the hill. Did you ever watch the tide change? There is a similar moment of quiet when the water has run all the way out in a long slow sigh. For an instant of deep silence, Nature holds her breath and then inhales again. You feel a spark of inner quickening as you become aware of this hesitation that warns of such a significant change. [1] The Turning of the Tide There is a spark of inner quickening today that warns of significant change -- of the turning of the tide. The dominant paradigm or picture in our minds of the world beyond our reach is turning. It is changing. And a whole new frame of mental reference is forming which emphasizes wholeness, connectedness and interdependence, and a different consciousness of self, others, human society and the natural world. The theologian Kenneth Cauthen describes the dimensions of this change: A new Gestalt is beginning to emerge. By this I mean that history is pregnant with a comprehensive way of perceiving, conceiving, and believing to which we are beckoned to help give birth. The new vision exists as a possibility arising out of the actualities of the present, but it lures us forward to actualize it in human thought, feeling, and action. The evidences of this evolving world view are appearing in the natural sciences, in the social sciences, in psychology, and in philosophy. It is beginning to be articulated by physiologists, biologists, economists, ecologists, planners, systems analysts, anthropologists, political scientists, futurists, and visionaries.... The new vision centers in an intuitive perception of wholes, or organized unities. Key words are [w]holistic, unitary, organic, synergy, and synthesis. The focus of attention is on total systems, seen as a unity of dynamically interacting, mutually sustaining parts, which work together to support the functions and goals of the whole unit. [2] Sometimes when the tide is changing, there is that peculiar and distinctive stillness and waiting, followed by the turn. Other times looking out across the water, you can see the tide change by the way the waves change. First here and then there, water movements reverse invisibly beneath the surface. It is then that you can, if you are looking, see the wind catch the water differently so that the waves look different where the tide has turned. I want to look with you now at some of the places in our society where the waves are looking different now, where the tide shows signs of having changed. We referred earlier to biology and subatomic physics where the paradigm has already changed. Willis W. Harman in An Incomplete Guide to the Future points out that the winds of change continue to blow in science, as research into consciousness and into psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis threaten to break open further old scientific beliefs which have declared such phenomena impossible. The tide is also changing around the religious institutions of Western civilization. The human spirit is reaching out in a bewildering panorama of religious and semi-religious movements to reclaim our connection to a mysterious spirit-dimension of our selfhood which, in our excessive concern with rationality, has been lost. The turning of some to the charismatic movement, to the Jesus Freaks, and to the Moonies is powerful evidence of a quickening within or alongside of traditional Western Christianity. Others have turned to Zen, the Divine Light Mission, Transcendental Meditation, or other derivatives of traditional Eastern religions. Still others turn to newer religious movements such as Scientology or to self-realization movements such as Arica and est. Process philosophy, systems analysis, and the women's movement -- how different! Yet each is a Trojan horse now within the high walls and moated castles of hierarchical thinking and the old paradigm. To think or feel systemically is to perceive wholistically. To think interconnectedly is to re-knit the body of knowledge which has been divided into problem areas and academic disciplines of the various specialties. We will never be the same again when it becomes apparent what systemic (or nonhierarchical) perceptions arising from these movements mean for the university, for the church, and for the economic, sexual, political, technological, and household arrangements of society. Our approach to problems and problem-solving will also never be the same again. Scientific reductionism-- reducing a problem to its parts and then understanding those parts by specialization -- will never again seem appropriate for all reality, and will become an important tool of limited usefulness. Our linear "one problem/one solution" thinking and our 1-2-3 outlines will be similarly humbled. All these are parts of a piecemeal way of approaching reality, and time has run out on that way of thinking. But, you may ask, what if piece-by-piece is the only way the human mind can comprehend reality? What if we cannot grasp the interconnected realities of wholes? We will then know we have not ever grasped all of reality. We will then be more tentative about the adequacy of our proposed solutions. And when we shape our tools-- our computers, our system dynamics studies and our systems analyses and whatever else we can dream up -- our goals will be more modest. We will be content just to approximate a little better than before what we will now see as a complex web of relationships, alive, life-giving, and constantly changing. The New Savoring of Diversity We will come to a new appreciation of the wisdom, shrewdness, and intuitive system-perceptions of "little people" as we finally acknowledge the actual complexity we are attempting to live within. Women, children, minorities, the local cop, the bookkeeper, the salesperson, the elevator operator, all the people who with a part of their lives are cogs in some part of our vast complex systems -- these people are often not highly trained. Their judgment has been shaped by limited but intensely immediate experience. They see things and understand things that never make it into supervisory reports or monthly statistics which, abstracted, go "to the top." Or into someone's financial control system which grinds everything down to the bottom line. [3] What these sorts of people know about where they live and what affects what they do, they have learned outside the processes of super-rational socialization which constitute the central experience of those who achieve eminence in our society, our predominantly male elites. There is among non-elites a widely held perception (and skepticism) of specialist-knowledge, of experts themselves, and of those they report to who supposedly are "in charge." Eloise Maclay expresses this sort of perception -- here in terms of psychiatrists and psychologists, but clearly the sentiment has obvious wider applicability:
They, In the past we have only appreciated the brilliance of the "stars," the elites who were at the top of cultural pyramids. We are slowly learning to appreciate the sparkle and importance of a diversity of people and a diversity of standing points within human systems. Frederick C. Thayer in his book An End to Hierarchy! An End to Competition! has identified how the hierarchical structuring of organizations has contributed to the devaluing of diversity in our culture. He points out that hierarchical organization is ultimately inefficient and destructive, as is economic competition. Why? Because he sees "alienation as the inexorable outcome of both." He argues for a wholistic and systemic understanding of organizations and society in which a diversity of people and a diversity of locations in a system all have contributions which are needed. Thayer urges a "new paradigm of mutually supportive interaction [that] will not require that individual contributions be evaluated, one against the other; all contributions will be valued." [5] The devaluing of diversity is a seldom perceived problem of hierarchy. When difference is perceived and immediately rated as above or below in status or power, then that which is perceived as "below" is expected to give up its diversity (inferiority) and aspire to be like that which is superior. Even our American tradition of being the great "melting pot" implied that the diversity coming into the United States would become Americanized. And at the top of that system was the WASP -- the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant who was the epitome of what it means to be straight/white/male. It was not a diversity game at all but a game of conformity in which the social tyranny of those at the top was subtly but firmly established, if not always by wealth and power, then by status. The Tyranny of Norms The dynamics by which hierarchies oppress and alienate has been explored further in a book about the hierarchies of male/female, white/black, and heterosexual ("straight")/homosexual ("gay") edited by Glenn R. Bucher. Straight/White/Male presents, among other things, the uses of social norms and the ways in which social difference become the occasion for social hierarchies of status, power and oppression. It is a book about the tyranny of norms. Social norms are the standards establishing which end of the social ladder is up. Some people embody these standards and find them natural expressions of who they are. For the rest those standards are that by which they are judged to be different than the norm and hence inferior. They "are not up to the norm." A social norm has power to oppress only because it is an expression of a social hierarchy or pyramid of status or power. The standards of status or power (and hence of oppression) may be clearly articulated (as in apartheid or in Jim Crow laws). Or they may be intuited as pervasive and seemingly universal social conventions (as in people's responses to Eliza Doolittle's perceived social status in My Fair Lady -- responses which changed totally as Eliza, with Professor Higgins' help, learned to speak "better" English). "Sociologically speaking," Glenn Bucher writes, "to be the oppressor is to be the social norm and reference point against which every definition of abnormality is judged." He goes on to point out that "Whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality are presumed to be the human criteria against which all others are measured." [6] He illustrates with the hierarchy in the small towns of America: Against this model [of independent middle-class Protestant males] all other social creatures are evaluated. Those who are not middleclass; who do not participate in respectable social institutions; who are not products of a "stable" home; who cannot claim they are "independent middle-class persons verbally living out Protestant ideals in the small towns of America," are destined to be social exceptions. To be the oppressor, then, means to be the human social norm. It is to have social prejudice, society's mores, and public morality tilted in one's direction. It is not to worry about respectability or respect. It is to be comfortable. It is to be familiar with social expectations. It could not be otherwise, given that straight white males also determine both the social rules and the punishments for those who fail to conform. [7] Such social "ratings" of people become additionally expressed in what they can get paid for their "worth" and their work. "Whether we speak of blacks in cotton fields (or their contemporary equivalents), women qua mothers in the home whose labor is free, or homosexuals discriminated against vocationally due to sexual preference," writes Bucher, "the conclusion is verifiable: straight white males perpetuate these economic arrangements, if in no other way, by their tacit approval of the economic benefits thereby procured for themselves. To be the oppressor is to be master of the 'American plantation.' A glance at the constituency of any corporate board, or the roster of America's chief corporate administrative officers, puts to rest any doubt." [8] Within such a "looking upward" society the need to become other than oneself has devastating psychological consequences. Consider the black experience: White wealth, white beauty, white culture were not only dominant but the standards by which all else was judged. Thus, nappy hair, the broad nose, the thick lips of the black person, being the antithesis of white characteristics, were ugly. Some blacks -- at the time the vast majority of blacks -- underwent much physical pain in a futile attempt, not to be like white people but to be white. And, as this is a physical impossibility, a certain psychopathology developed in which the black person became a non-person. Franz Fanon describes it this way: "When the Negro makes contact with the white world, a certain sensitizing action takes place. If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. The black man stops behaving as an actional person. The goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man), for The Other alone can give him worth." [9] But there is a sense in which norms tyrannize all, and in which even those perceived from below to be oppressors are themselves oppressed. It is the oppression of a socialization which demands that the character and personality of particular individual males be narrowed to conform to the stereotype being approved and rewarded. It is the common experience of men to be socialized into the competitive, aggressive, individualistic attitudes necessary to build a career in a society that considers those character traits to be superior. Furthermore, it is the collective experience of males to be psychologically dependent upon their career success for satisfaction and a positive self-image. [10] • • • The worth of a male is measured by self and others on the basis of success standards related to these aspects of his life. Economic power, personal wealth, political power, professional status, straight sexual prowess, and control over the family are indices of normative masculinity. [11] The tyranny of this straight, white male norm has only very recently been questioned by the movements of "Black Is Beautiful," ethnicity, gayness and sisterhood. Over the past ten years, the cultural hegemony dominating America has begun to erode as different segments of the population have come to see that America has been exclusively defined according to the needs and desires of a ruling elite of white, middle-aged, male heterosexuals. In turn blacks, the young, women, and homosexuals have challenged this hegemony and as a result America is more fragmented, more divided, and yet freer than ever before in its history. [12] The Decline of the Power of the Norm An analysis of TV programming from 1960 to 1975 that I did several years ago [13] provides an interesting mirror in which to view the erosion of this cultural hegemony. When we look at TV historically, we see the early programs were all centered around exceptional individuals -- super comics such as Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, super singers such as Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, super Western heroes as in "Gunsmoke" or "Bonanza," super war heroes as in "Twelve O'Clock High," super sleuths as in "Perry Mason" and "Bat Man," super knowledge as in "The $64,000 Question," even super dogs like "Lassie." Underlying the choice of all these programs was the assumption that the main character of a TV program was an outstanding person or persons in some way normative for the rest of society to admire. In this period almost all the main characters were white males (with the notable exception of Lucille Ball in "I Love Lucy"). When families were the focus of a situation comedy, as in "I Love Lucy," "Leave It to Beaver," "Ozzie and Harriet," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and that classic "Father Knows Best," the family was always "typical" -- white, middle-class, Mother and Father both in residence, usually two children, and the father always employed in a secure white-collar job such as an insurance salesman, lawyer, or doctor. About the only exception in that period was "The Andy Griffith Show," which had a father alone raising a son with the assistance of Aunt Bea, who kept house for them. "Andy Griffith" was also different in being set in a small town in the South at a time when most family shows were suburban. In the late 1960s the family situation comedy moved into a transitional phase with a burst of new shows which did not portray the usual "normative" family -- "My Three Sons," "Family Affair," "The Partridge Family," "Julia," "The Courtship of Eddy's Father," and "The Brady Bunch." With the advent of these family shows, all the children in the viewing public who were living on so-called "broken homes" could now feel they were no longer odd or different from the norm, because the spectrum of what was "normal" had widened to include many different ways of living in families, and the settings had widened from suburban to urban high-rise and even in "Three for the Road" to a mobile home. Women as main characters suddenly become numerous on the television screen in the early 1970s -- first with "That Girl" and "Mary Tyler Moore" (both career women, unmarried), followed by "Rhoda" (married but the star), "Phyllis" (widowed), "Fay" (divorced woman), "Maude" (middle-aged, twice-divorced), "Policewoman" (white, sexy, competent), and "Christie Love" (black, sexy, competent). This same period saw the rise of the black hero as in countless "shoot 'em up" shows -- "Mission Impossible," "I Spy," "Mod Squad," "Ironside," "The Rookies," "SWAT" -- competent and courageous black males became part of integrated teams. Similarly on children's television "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" made city streets and black faces commonplace in a way that "Captain Kangaroo" had not done for an earlier generation of children. But could television go lower-class? And could it portray those who were handicapped physically or whose competencies were not heroic but human? Into the world of the fast-moving and agile detective came "Ironside," the cripple, doing his detecting from a wheelchair and letting his staff do the nabbing. Soon to follow was "Longstreet," an insurance investigator who is blind but manages to be efficient in his own way. "Harry O" stands out as a private eye because he alone, anticipating the energy crisis, does not give chase in sleek automobiles but rides the common bus! There has always been an economic dimension to television heroics. Archie Bunker in "All in the Family" was perhaps the break-through for the class barrier. For a long time the jobs of the main character on TV were always middle-class or above. But Archie works on a loading dock, lives in a smaller-scale nonsuburban house, and feels like "a little guy who gets screwed by those big guys." "Sanford and Sons," "Chico and the Man," and "Arnie" take us into the lives of a junkman, a garage mechanic, and a foreman of the loading dock who has just taken the next step up. So if we look at television as a mirror of our culture, what do we see has happened to the norm? The name of the game is not "rightness" any more, or "do you match the unattainable image of the hero?" The image has become broad enough to include almost all of us, black and white, Jewish and Puerto-Rican and Italian, whole and handicapped, young and middle-aged and elderly, female as well as male, bigoted as well as liberal. The name of the game is now "people" -- and people are diverse. The message is becoming clear on television, "I'm OK, you're OK." Whether crippled like Ironside, bigoted like Archie, abrasive like Maude, we can still identify with you, for what is being legitimized by television before our very eyes is a new image of human diversity and how precious, how fallible, how flawed, yet how okay it is. [LC-1] Hierarchy Expressed in Law Hierarchical thinking has embodied a refusal to receive the diversity of creation as enrichment and has perceived it instead as a threat. It is not surprising, then, that the ethical and legal systems evolved within hierarchical social systems have been structured not only to safeguard the position of those "above" but also to create limbos of legal "non-being" for what is defined by the hierarchy as "below" or "beyond legal rights." Women, until they were no longer the property of men, had no legal rights of their own. Slaves had no legal rights; like women and children and animals and plants and land, slaves were the property of men, who were the only locus of legal rights. While animals today are not always considered property except when bought and sold, animals have no legal rights which could prevent their being hunted, trapped, used for research, starved to make them "eager eaters" for television commercials, and otherwise abused in ways that make you want to cry out. Man Kind? asks Cleveland Amory in his haunting book with the subtitle, "Our Incredible War on Wildlife." [14] Peter Singer has written a book called Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. [15] Singer coins the word "speciesism" to refer to "an attitude, often unconscious, that considers species other than our own to be without consciousness, feelings, or rights, existing only to be used for the convenience of the master species." [16] Singer contends that speciesism is as dangerous and insidious as racism and sexism because "it allows us to exploit, torture and kill other animals without feeling guilty." [17] Carl Sagan also raises the question of animal rights very strongly in his book about the evolution of human intelligence: The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due .... *** If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as "human rights"? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion? I recently was escorted through a large primate research laboratory by its director. We approached a long corridor lined, to the vanishing point as in a perspective drawing, with caged chimpanzees. They were one, two or three to a cage, and I am sure the accommodations were exemplary as far as such institutions (or for that matter traditional zoos) go. As we approached the nearest cage, its two inmates bared their teeth and with incredible accuracy let fly great sweeping arcs of spittle, fairly drenching the lightweight suit of the facility's director. They then uttered a staccato of short shrieks, which echoed down the corridor to be repeated and amplified by other caged chimps, who had certainly not seen us, until the corridor fairly shook with the screeching and banging and rattling of bars .... I was powerfully reminded of those American motion pictures of the 1930s and 40s, set in some vast and dehumanized state or federal penitentiary, in which the prisoners banged their eating utensils against the bars at the appearance of the tyrannical warden. These chimps are healthy and well-fed. If they are "only" animals, if they are beasts which abstract not, then my comparison is a piece of sentimental foolishness. But chimpanzees can abstract. Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer, but I think it is certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison? [18] Theodore S. Meth is a lawyer who teaches the only course in the country on animals and the law. [19] Meth raises some fascinating questions: Koko is a young female gorilla with a vocabulary and intelligence of a five-year-old child. Through sign-language, she converses with people and makes up new words when she doesn't have the exact word she wants. She talks to herself when she plays with her dolls. She is aware of herself. She probably reasons and feels very much as we do. • • • We are looking at a legal marvel, what I have called an "animal person." • • • The ability to use language has long been considered the characteristic that distinguishes man from animals. But what about Koko, the gorilla who "talks" in sign language? Have Koko and other trained primates crossed a legal dividing line [opening up a whole new legal era]? [20] The Legal "Never-Never Land" of Children Children today in our hierarchical society and legal system are viewed as "belonging" to their parents. This gives parents legal rights over their children which are nearly absolute and thus frightening in their implications. For example, in most states parents can commit their children to mental institutions without the child having any legal right to a lawyer, a hearing, or a chance to tell their side of the story. [21] Doctors who become aware of a pattern of injuries to a child which suggest child-abuse find it difficult to intervene; there is a strong tradition in our hierarchical culture which -- apart from a few very general guidelines about child labor and required school attendance -- presumes that parents have a right to raise their children in their formative years as the parents see fit. This is what it means for a child to be legally a "minor." We are just beginning to take the lid off the problem of child-abuse and the related problems of wife-beating and rape, and admit to ourselves the prevalence and seriousness of these problems. Elizabeth Janeway has pointed out in "The Weak Are the Second Sex" [22] that men who perceive themselves to be powerless within our hierarchically structured economic and social systems, comfort themselves that they are at least "above women." I would make an analogy with the psychological needs of poor whites in the South who have tried to keep the black man "in his place" below them: men who feel economically impotent feel a need to "reign in power at home." Sometimes that power takes the form of hitting and physically abusing wife and children. Mothers too can feel impotent, and take out their feelings in physical abuse of their children. We have laughed about the man who comes home from work and shouts at his wife, who in turn hits the child, who in turn kicks the cat or dog. Hierarchical systems channel frustrations and violence from above toward those below. Hierarchical thinking and legal systems legitimate the "exporting" of such stresses to those who are lower down in the pecking order. The reality of widespread child-abuse as well as the selling of children by parents into child pornography are flagrant examples of the abuses of parenthood. These practices rest squarely upon the hierarchical presumption that adults "own" their children and are equipped to be "responsible stewards" of their children's lives. But there are changes in the wind. Those "below" are becoming empowered, and they are challenging the ugly realities of physical abuse, incest, rape, and lynching, which constitute the violence (and threats of violence) that have held them in their place. Feminists are organizing to assist victims of wife-beating and rape. The culture-at-large is becoming more concerned about violent crimes such as rape and "in-house" exploitations such as incest and child-abuse. Concern for the legal rights of children is building as more people perceive that the system as it is now legally structured gives children very few rights. It does this because our legal system conceptualizes children as having no rights but always being in the custody of those who do have rights -- adults or society-as-parent. In the extremely important case In Re: Gault 387 U.S. I (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court gave to children for the first time certain due process rights heretofore residing only in adults. It held that in legal actions in which children were threatened with removal from their family to an institutional setting, they had the right to notice, to legal counsel, to cross-examine, and Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The Exercise of Paternalism If this is the ethical and legal standing of women, children and animals, what of nature itself? Aldo Leopold wistfully comments in his Sand County Almanac that ethical systems have never been extended from the human to the natural. When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence. This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.... The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.... There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relationship to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. [23] Leopold seems to visualize the extension of ethics in horizontal terms -- as in an ever-widening circle of light. But as any black will tell you, the movement from "property" to "peer" is upward, and the need to "move up" is totally derivative from the hierarchical paradigm that dominates our collective consciousness. You can see this hierarchical paradigm clearly in these passages from Ecology and Human Liberation, a book written for the World Council of Churches by Christian theologian Thomas Derr. No doubt about it, the Bible does say plainly that it is in the charter for man's existence that he should have "dominion" over and "subdue" the earth and all its other creatures.... The command comes only to man made "in the image of God." At the apex of creation, he is set in the Garden.... But the original placement of man above nature is not in error ecologically.... • • • It is the distinction from nature, the acceptance of dominion, that makes us human. We rise out of nature. The word we use for this process of human ascent is civilization.... Without his "spirit," he would be reduced to the level of the beasts.... [24] Thomas Derr would be upset with the possibility of extending ethics or rights to nature, because he goes on to say: The principal intention of ecological revisionism in theology is to establish a value for nature independent of man and of such intensity that man may "love" it or hold it in "reverence".... Yet the revisionists argue that ecological destruction is wrong because it violates the earth itself, with its own intrinsic rights -- not because such destruction makes it impossible for the divine-human drama to go on, and renders the lot of the masses miserable. But these latter points are more typical of Biblical concerns, rather more important than defending the intrinsic rights of nature. [25] It is interesting to see this same abhorrence for the rights of nature expressed by Passmore in his classic, Man's Responsibility for Nature. One of my colleagues, an ardent preservationist, condemns me as a "human chauvinist." What he means is that in my ethical arguments, I treat human interests as paramount.... The supposition that anything but a human being has "rights" is, or so I have suggested, quite untenable. [26] (Emphasis added.) The attitudes of Derr and Passmore toward intrinsic rights for nature reinforce my personal suspicion of interpretations of the environmental ethic as "responsible stewardship." That concept is paternalistic, clothed still in hierarchical categories, and subtly related to such old ideas as "enlightened slave owners" and "the white man's burden." "To be graciously responsible for that which is below us" is not really our situation amid the interconnections of spaceship earth. Yet it is widely touted as an acceptable version of the environmental ethic and as the correct Judeo-Christian interpretation of that Genesis 1:26 text about "dominion." Just as women did not wish to be the property of even "responsible husbands," and slaves did not wish to be owned by even the most enlightened slave owners, so too the earth will not flourish as the "property" of even responsible stewardship wielded from "above." Power corrupts, and self-interest always motivates those "above" to the detriment of those "below." Great is the power of human rationalization to justify such self-interest and to make it appear to be "responsible." From Legal Limbo to Legal Standing Just as women, children, gays, blacks, Chicanos, and the poor of the earth are reaching out from their hierarchical oblivion for their rights, some are also beginning to assert the claim of trees and animals and nature itself to intrinsic rights. That natural objects should have legal rights has been argued by Christopher D. Stone in an essay "Should Trees Have Standing?" [27] which appeared in late 1972 in the Southern California Law Review. This line of argument was almost immediately picked up by the U.S. Supreme Court in its minority opinions in the controversial Mineral King-Disney-Sierra Club (4-3) decision. Stone argues that natural objects should be accorded the three aspects of legal privileges which go with being a holder of legal rights: (1) the right to initiate legal action at its own behest; (2) the court, in determining the granting of legal relief, must take injury to it into account; and (3) legal relief must run to the benefit of it. [28] Stone points out that corporations have legal standing. (I would add the obvious -- that corporations have this legal standing only because a legal system dominated by white males decided they really needed corporations to have this legal standing.) And, like natural objects, corporations are not human. Corporations are abstractions and belong to a whole class of inanimate right-holders -- trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, ships, and nationstates, to name a few -- which Stone points out "people" the world of the lawyer. [29] Because corporations and all these other inanimate human creations have rights, Stone sees no inherent legal reason for denying legal standing to natural objects. Though mute, natural objects are better able to communicate their needs than corporations. ... Natural objects can communicate their wants (needs) to us, and in ways that are not terribly ambiguous. I am sure I can judge with more certainty and meaningfulness whether and when my lawn wants (needs) water, than the Attorney General can judge whether and when the United States wants (needs) to take an appeal from an adverse judgment by a lower court. The lawn tells me that it wants water by a certain dryness of the blades and soil -- immediately obvious to the touch -- the appearance of bald spots, yellowing, and a lack of springiness after being walked on; how does "the United States" communicate to the Attorney General? For similar reasons, the guardian-attorney for a smog-endangered stand of pines could venture with more confidence that this client wants the smog stopped, than the directors of a corporation can assert that "the corporation" wants dividends declared. We make decisions on behalf of, and in the purported interests of, others every day; these "others" are often creatures whose wants are far less verifiable, and even far more metaphysical in conception, than the wants of rivers, trees, and land. [30] It is fascinating to me that as Stone explores what has in the past made the extension of legal rights to oppressed minorities "unthinkable," he alludes to the presence of hierarchical thinking without ever explicitly labeling it as such. Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable. We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless "things" to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo. It is thus that we defer considering the choices involved in all their moral, social, and economic dimensions. And so the United States Supreme Court could straight-facedly tell us in Dred Scott that Blacks had been denied the rights of citizenship "as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race.... " In the nineteenth century, the highest court in California explained that Chinese had not the right to testify against white men in criminal matters because they were "a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point ... between whom and ourselves nature has placed an impassable difference." The popular conception of the Jew in the 13th Century contributed to a law which treated them as "men ferae naturae, protected by a quasi-forest law. Like the roe and the deer, they form an order apart".... The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new "entity," the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of "us" -- those who are holding rights at the time. [31] A New Season A new season is blowing up the valley, drifting over the hills, rising up from a cooling earth, a new season with its challenges, its changes, its excitements, and its own particular rhythms and miracles. [32] A new season of consciousness is indeed blowing up the valley. There are people seriously talking about plants having feelings, about talking to plants, about communicating with the Devas (spirits of plant forms) as in the Findhorn gardens. [33] Ten years ago no one could have sold anyone a Pet Rock, not to mention sold tens of thousands at a price of five dollars each! Research on the dolphin language is taking place with the serious hope that someday we may talk back and forth with another species. Research with primates using sign-language and computer-language has already made that possible with the species closest to us. Our culture is beginning to take seriously the notion that consciousness is not solely a human attribute. The opening up of consciousness to new ways of responding to life builds momentum as experiences multiply. New perceptions are reinforced while some of our old ones crumble. It is a dynamic which tears off old blinders, dynamites old roles, undermines old stereotypes, and finally leads through a long tunnel of mind-blowing experiences to new psychic space. Listen to Jean Hersey describe such an experience. Recently Bob and I went to a lecture at which we learned a wonderfully interesting discipline. You take five minutes a day and look at any object -- a paperclip, pencil, leaf, silver fork, flower -- any object at all. For the whole five minutes you must keep your attention on the object in your hand. First you are supposed to see it physically, really observe it. Then you travel with it.... You can go forward or backward [in time], but you must stay with the object. ... *** ... I took up a small piece of jade that I had picked up some years ago on a beach near Big Sur, California. Holding it in my hand a while, I remembered reading somewhere that God sleeps in stones, stirs in vegetables, wakes in animals, and moves through Man. What a potential there was in that stone in my palm! I began to look at it, study its tear-drop shape and color variations, and to be aware of its pleasant smoothness. It appeared to be a solid stone; but in the light of what we know today, I told myself, it is really made of separate atoms with spaces between each and if I were small enough, I could pass through it. In a kind of reverie, I imagined the stone growing larger and larger and myself smaller until I could enter it. Then I passed easily among the atoms that formed tall green corridors like a great forest and I was aware of a rhythmic swaying around me. I don't know how long I was there, but after a while I was back in our living room with a small piece of jade in my hand, sun streaming in the window -- and it was time to go for the mail. *** It taught me that normally I don't half see what I look at. I began looking at everything differently and really seeing the blanket as I made the bed, the texture of the sock I darned, the carrot I peeled. A thrilling world opened up around me in the little daily things that I handled and had not really appreciated. [34] The changing of consciousness is like the ice breaking up after a long winter. This particular changing of consciousness is akin to the breakup of feudalism at the end of the Middle Ages, as old patterns of life and thought split apart and crumble away. New constellations of perception slowly formed, and out of them was born our modern world -- the structures of political, economic and social life we call our own. So too today, old patterns are crumbling, and out of the ruins will emerge new institutions built upon totally new ways of perceiving and living in our world. History is at a turning point. In such a time of transition, we cannot see clearly where the changes lead. We can only sense the loss of momentum in one direction and feel the surging newness in another, impatient to be born. It is a time to take a mental breath and let go. _______________ Librarian's Comment: [LC-1] The author's optimistic view of television programming assumes that depicting a few minorities or "non-traditional" families in sitcoms demonstrated a groundswell in television programming that caused the boob-tube to become an inclusive reflection of a diverse society growing ever more harmonious and accepting. Since when have trivial comedies that ridicule their subjects, like Sanford and Son and Archie, been considered evidence of an elevated social consciousness? These cultural artifacts demonstrate the tremendous timidity of network programmers, who: depicted blacks as alright, as long as they owned a junky house, drove a beat-up pickup, and bickered like uneducated fools about trivial matters; gave a raving bigot a pass, because he didn't actually burn crosses; allowed Marlo Thomas to live alone in a city as long as she was frivolous and exuberant; and, continued providing a steady diet of absurd fantasy with talking horses, women in bottles, witches with twitchy noses, and Martians who were obviously gay. The true cultural markers were network news -- there was no black Walter Cronkite, no diverse Huntley-Brinkley show. The serious, authoritative talking heads who served as the father figures for the nation were always male, always white, always serious. The author seems to have imbibed some type of happy juice that predisposes her to impute positive social motives to people we know were working night and day solely to program consumers into mindless purchasing of the products offered by their sponsors -- Dial soap, Marlboro cigarettes, and the "big, bright green pleasure machines" that Simon and Garfunkle sang about. Her view would pass for nostalgia of a very reactionary sort if it had been written today. Read as a contemporary assessment of popular media, it sounds like a promotional piece produced by the networks explaining that they do not need to sponsor more public service programming, because they are already doing so much social good.
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